Communities

Home cooks connect, share recipes, and engage in conversations around food — transforming cooking from a solo task into a shared experience.

My Role

I led end-to-end design for Samsung Food, an AI-powered platform that helps users discover, personalize, and share over 160,000 recipes. The app supports meal planning, ingredient shopping, and dietary customization through Food AI, while allowing users to save, standardize, and analyze recipes.

Platform

iOS, Android, Web

Timeline

Q2 - Q4 ‘21

Home Activity Feed

Community Recipe Activity

Recipe Activity

Background

I designed Communities, a key social feature that transformed Samsung Food from a passive recipe app into an engaging, connected platform. Initially limited to basic recipe sharing, the app lacked meaningful interaction—slowing community growth.

Objective

Introduce interactive social features grounded in habit-forming principles to foster vibrant discussions, creativity, and collaboration among home cooks.

Approach

Working closely with Product, Data, Design, Engineering, and Marketing teams, I applied habit-forming principles—triggers, actions, and rewards—to design features that encouraged meaningful user interaction. This cross-functional approach boosted engagement, fostered community growth, and added value to Samsung’s smart kitchen ecosystem.

Communities

A community feed aggregating all posts, allowing users to initiate and participate in discussions about recipes, ingredients, and cooking techniques.​

Our success metrics were 20% of WAU in communities created at least one post, and 30% of WAU viewed at least one post

Create Posts: Enabled users to share content within their communities, with functionalities to:​

  • Select a community via a dropdown menu directly from post creation.​

  • Enhance posts by attaching recipes from personal collections or uploading photos, encouraging richer engagement.​

Add Recipes: Users can enhance their posts by attaching a recipe directly from their personal recipe collections, making posts more informative and engaging for the community.

Add Photos: Users can personalize their posts by uploading a photo directly from their camera or photo library, adding a visual element to enhance engagement and storytelling.

Create Post

Results

Post-launch metrics indicated varying levels of engagement between public and private communities:​

The data revealed higher engagement in private communities, where users shared more personal content, such as photos of their culinary creations. In contrast, public communities, marked by greater anonymity, saw users primarily posting questions accompanied by recipes. These findings underscore the importance of tailoring engagement strategies to the nature of the community.​

challenges & key takeaways

While overall engagement fell short of expectations, data confirmed that applying a habit-forming framework successfully increased social actions.

Forming new social behaviors is inherently difficult. To address this, I worked closely with cross-functional teams to embed social features into existing user flows—like saving or sharing recipes—to encourage organic adoption. Our strategy focused on three key areas: rewarding user contributions, increasing content discoverability, and lowering the barrier to participation.

Next Steps

Stronger Rollout Strategy: Improve feature announcements and empower community admins to seed early discussions, building momentum from launch.

Boost Discoverability:

  • Add new entry points for creating and exploring posts.

  • Enable external sharing to draw in engagement from outside the platform.

  • Introduce reactions and notifications to trigger interaction.

  • Design a unified home feed to surface all posts in one place.

These enhancements aim to deepen engagement, improve usability, and support the growth of vibrant, active communities.

Reflection

By integrating interactive social features grounded in habit-forming principles, we fostered new social habits within Samsung Food, leading to increased user engagement and community growth.

As Samsung Food evolves into a smart food ecosystem personalized through deep learning and a robust “food genome,” communities remain a vital part of the experience.

I'm proud of our ambitious push to build a social layer that connects home cooks globally—sparking engagement and enriching how people cook and share. While challenges around content creation and discovery revealed areas for growth, the work laid a strong foundation for community-driven experiences that continue to scale with the platform.